First Chapter

'Edward Abbey: A Life'

By JAMES M. CAHALAN

Published: February 10, 2002

Demythologizing Edward Abbey starts at birth. Key to the persuasive myth that he created about himself, as reinforced in several of his essays and books, was the impression that he had been born and reared entirely on a hardscrabble Appalachian farm that had been in the family for generations, near a village with the strikingly appropriate and charming name of Home, Pennsylvania. In addition to book jackets, even Abbey's academic vita listed him as &quot;born in Home.&quot; And in his private diary as late as 1983, Abbey whimsically recalled &quot;the night of January 29th, 1927, in that lamp-lit room in the old farmhouse near Home, Pennsylvania, when I was born&quot; (308). In fact, that night at 10:30, weighing in at nine pounds, three ounces, Abbey was born in the hospital of the good-sized town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, with doctor and nurse in attendance, as recorded on his birth certificate and noted in the baby book that his mother kept. Mildred and Paul Abbey's baby, the first of five who survived, went home not to any farm but to their small rented house on North Third Street in a cramped neighborhood in Indiana, the county seat of Indiana County, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains fifty-five miles northeast of Pittsburgh.

Nor was Abbey's origin myth only a matter of his birthplace, for his family never lived on a farm until he was fourteen years old; instead, they migrated all around the county as the Depression arrived. Before moving closer to Home (a tiny, unincorporated village about ten miles north of Indiana) when he was four and a half years old, his family stayed at several other places. These included two dwellings in Saltsburg, twenty miles southwest of Indiana, and a series of campsites across Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the summer of 1931. During Abbey's early childhood, his father was not a farmer but a real estate salesman, dealing in properties for the A. E. Strout Farm Agency.

The gap between Indiana and Home involves more than mileage: the larger county seat, in the valley, is the center of the county's commerce, whereas the little village, in the uplands, is merely a blip on Route 119, in a mostly rural county with one of the highest unemployment rates in Pennsylvania. But it was (and is) also beautiful countryside: rolling foothills, leisurely valleys carved by a meandering network of creeks and rivers, and everywhere&#151;despite the ravages of coal and logging companies&#151;trees, trees, and more trees, both pines and an endless deciduous array. Indiana County enjoys one of the most beautiful autumns in the world. After the mild green summer, everywhere trees erupt into brilliant reds and golds. The long winter can be dark, but it is also marked by some brilliant winter days with blue skies and snow-covered slopes. It is often cloudy in this area, but when it does clear up, the sky becomes shockingly crystalline, with the stars brightly radiant at night in a way never seen in any city. And when spring finally arrives, it is announced dramatically by an ongoing, late-day chorus of frogs, the &quot;spring peepers.&quot; In short, no place could be more different than&#151;yet in its own way sometimes just as gorgeous as&#151;the American Southwest that Abbey would make his transplanted home and subject.

As much as he liked to conjure up &quot;Home&quot; as his own personal origin myth, the adult Edward Abbey was aware that he had been born in Indiana. When accuracy was important&#151;filling out federal employment applications, for example&#151;he listed Indiana, not Home, as his birthplace. But &quot;Home&quot; sounded better on book jackets&#151;part of the self-created myth of the man. Clarke Cartwright Abbey, his last wife, recollected that &quot;he just liked the way it sounded, the humor of being from Home.&quot; He would always identify much more with the Appalachian uplands around Home than with the trade center of Indiana. People in this region seldom identify themselves as &quot;Appalachian,&quot; but Abbey would understand that in truth Indiana County has much more in common with Morgantown, West Virginia, than with Allentown or other places in eastern Pennsylvania. He retained vivid memories of Indiana, describing it at the beginning of his significantly entitled book Appalachian Wilderness : &quot;There was the town set in the cup of the green hills. In the Alleghenies. A town of trees, two-story houses, red-brick hardware stores, church steeples, the clock tower on the county courthouse, and over all the thin blue haze&#151;partly dust, partly smoke, but mostly moisture&#151;that veils the Appalachian world most of the time. The diaphanous veil that conceals nothing.&quot; His first book, Jonathan Troy, is set in Indiana, Pennsylvania (thinly disguised under the Native American name Powhatan), and its immediate surroundings&#151;the first novel with this particular setting by any author and Abbey's only book focused entirely on his home county.